How we created the illusion of distant horizons for exterior sets in "Lunatics!"

This is a two-minute tutorial that was, evidently, exclusive to Patreon subscribers in 2015, and was never uploaded until now!

This audiodrama episode was produced in 2013, using the dialog originally intended for the animated episode, combined with additional voiceover by Terry Hancock and music.

FULL CREDITS

Textless episode titles / end credits animation.

00:00 Episode Credits Animation

Music:

Title animation for "Lunatics!" pilot episode, without overlaid text.

Music:

Animated "tour" of the Mission Control Room set, after dressing it with props and adding posed extras characters. In the actual episode, this will only be on screen for a few seconds and mostly from behind the characters, so they don't really have to hold up from other angles, or for very a long time.

But as a behind-the-scenes extra, this tour allows you to see the set up close. Of course, this does reveal some "easter eggs" and some details that aren't quite convincing at close range.

The camera moves along each aisle, up close, and then around the outside of the desks.

Music by "Monoton" (remixed slightly from two tracks "Wunderwerk der Technik" & "Start to Odyssey") from "An Odyssey to the Moon", Jamendo #40852).

Demo of the separated Ink & Paint layers.

I'm still considering how I want to organizing the compositing stage. Ideally, I want separate access to the ink and paint layers for touch-up work (i.e. to matte out bad lines, add new ones with Grease Pencil, and similarly to make corrections to the paint layer).

Masks (which are basically "traveling mattes" can be used as nodes in compositing. I know very little about Grease Pencil, so it's time to learn!

A collection of shot footage rendered for the "Soyuz Flight" sequence of the pilot episode of "Lunatics!"

The status of these is "pre-composite", which means they are composited using the default configuration in the render file as a preview of what the final composited image will look like. This also means they include descriptive text overlays and frame counter. Further adjustments in lighting, contrast, etc, may be done in the compositing stage.

For more information, check the Lunatics Production Log.

This is a test animation of my physics-based simulation rig for Georgiana's toy "space bunny" from the "Lunatics!" pilot.

I was having difficulty animating this realistically, so I decided to try simulating it. The idea is that the core of the model will be parented to Georgiana's hand or the belt strap holding it, and the physics will determine the rest of the movement.

It's a qualified success, but there are still some issues. The collision with the floor (and the cube) seems to happen well outside their apparent boundaries, and there is an odd sort of oscillation that I can't seem to get rid of. However, the overall movement is pretty good, particularly when it is not interacting with passive rigid body world objects.

It's been over 7 years since my last "2-Minute 2-Torial", so it seems only right to bring it back for "Twos Day" -- Tuesday, 22-2-22 (ISO - or 2/22/22 or 22/2/22, if you prefer your dates American or European, respectively).

Transcript:

This is very useful in animation workflow, because we often want to use stand-in versions of shots, and then replace them, later.

In this shot, for example, I simply used a drawing and panned across it in Blender

I also wasn't sure exactly how long it should be. I can adjust that with the speed

Later, I went through several versions of the shot, as more and more elements were

These aren't just different shots. In Kdenlive, they are different kinds of shots:

The storyboard animatic may use the "Change Speed" tool to adjust the timing, or

The Open GL animatic previews are usually AVI video files, rendered directly from

And the final renders are usually a series of frames rendered to a lossless

Each of these is stored differently, and you can't simply reload the clip in the

But you can update them easily in a separate Kdenlive file.

Then you use that Kdenlive file AS the clip in the scene you are editing.

With proxy-workflow (which I'll explain in another video), this is just as fast as

It also makes it easy to use special effects, like limited framerates, as I used

The final edit file only sees video, through all of these steps, and it updates

This is a simple demonstration and rigging test animation for a 14-segment display prop in Blender. It can display a choice of 22 messages (if you design them not to overlap, you could even do multiple messages at once). This is more than enough for the applications I need it for, and it doesn't require a script to support it. Relies on the "DSEG" font package from www.keshikan.com, which is packaged for Debian as the 'fonts-dseg' package, under the SIL Open Font License.

This was created for a close-up shot of a control panel in the pilot episode of "Lunatics!", "No Children in Space", though I anticipate reusing the display or at least the design later.